Fan token folly and the benevolent football DAO of the future
Crypto, NFTs and web3 have had an inauspicious introduction to football, peddling the same false promises as previous carpet-baggers. But is there potential under the pyre?
Micky Mellon has a special place in my heart.
Before his first departure as Tranmere Rovers manager was scandalously expedited by the club’s farcical relegation from EFL League One in the truncated 2019/2020 season, Mellon had dragged them kicking and screaming out of the doldrums.
In 2017, I went to Wembley to support Tranmere against Forest Green Rovers in the National League Promotion Final, known by all normal folk as the play-off final. They lost. One year later they, and I, returned. The 2018 play-off final became one of my favourite football matches of all time. They won another one in 2019. It was an extraordinary achievement.
Mellon returned to Prenton Park in 2021 but it’s just never the same, is it? Tranmere chairman Mark Palios sacked him this past weekend, in the aftermath of a really poor home defeat against Newport County and in the midst of a bad run of form.
He’ll always have Prenton South.
Fan token folly and the benevolent football DAO of the future
It always seems to follow the same script. From MyFootballClub to OWNAFC and everything in between, the promises of collaborative football club ownership are long on ambition and short on reality.
At its peak MyFootballClub amassed more than 32,000 members, of whom 27,000 were in place when it took over FA Trophy holders Ebbsfleet United – formerly Gravesend & Northfleet – in 2008. Most of those member-owners disappeared at renewal time and the club eventually found its way into Kuwaiti hands by 2013.
MyFootballClub became the archetype for vacuous community ownership models in the decade that followed but wasn’t disastrous for the long-term outlook of the club itself. Ebbsfleet were relegated and promoted in the MyFootballClub era. They’ve been promoted and relegated since.
Where MyFootballClub and its bastard offspring fail is in what they promise in the first place. Members, they say, will be part of a remote community (we’re not talking about fan or trust ownership, here) that own and run a football club. They’ll be chairman and manager. They’ll vote on transfers and teams and tactics.
I’d hope it’s obvious that the parasite model is by definition detrimental to the host club. I’m inclined to give MyFootballClub the benefit of the doubt as an inevitable and well-intentioned but silly experiment, but it’s plain that most of those that came later simply didn't do their homework. And still there are more.
They don’t know about MyFootballClub because they’re not football people. Their passion is in the model – the business or the technology – not the football club. There aren’t many worse reasons for buying one.
Some of these start-ups are wholly fraudulent from the beginning. Even those that aren’t outright crooks seek to hoodwink members, also not football people for the most part, into believing they’ll have a say on football. Unwittingly or otherwise these are false promises. They cannot, will not, run the club by democracy for any meaningful period of time.
With the onset of web3, football’s magnetic attraction to outside innovators and charlatans alike has diverged.
On the one hand, we have fan tokens. One of the more prominent fan token partners in football and other sports is Socios, so we’ll take that as the example. Socios fan tokens are sold via club promotions on the basis that they allow access to some stuff. Not quite the MyFootballClub sort of stuff, but stuff nonetheless. It’s labelled as “fan engagement” and fan engagement is bullshit, but there are other problems too.
Firstly, the rewards for holding a fan token for your football club are superficial guff. Secondly, you’re actually buying tradeable digital assets using a Socios cryptocurrency that exists outside the club and whose value is so dominated by traders and uninfluenced by football that your team can literally sign actual Lionel Messi and all it does is give traders a chance to dump after the pump.
Oh, and Messi is a Socios ambassador thanks to a $20m partnership paid in good old-fashioned cash money, and I’m sure that’s fine. Totally cool.
As long as they feed into an open market, fan tokens are folly, fakery, snake oil of the highest order. Around the time Messi signed for Paris Saint-Germain, Premier League supporters railed against their clubs partnering with Socios. Recruiting fans into volatile cryptocurrency ownership is despicable business and it makes me sick to my stomach that my own club is complicit.
On the other hand, there’s the predictable move into member-owner models by crypto bros who think they’re the first people to ride into town, tell us we’re broken and just happen to have skin in the remedy. The lessons of the past mean nothing to them because they’re really in it for money or proof of concept, and they don’t know about them anyway.
In England we now have what could be described as a Bitcoin club in non-league and a club supposedly powered by non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the bottom tier of the EFL. Real Bedford is a story for another day, but WAGMI United’s ownership of Crawley Town is weapons-grade nonsense, built on the affected fandom of distant web3 zealots who care about Crawley until they don’t.
“The Internet’s Team” might sound like a selling point on the outside, but it ignores the basic truth that “The Internet” doesn’t give a toss about Crawley or any other club. It’s MyFootballClub by new means and it will end the same way. If Crawley are lucky.
What you’ve read so far is quite a hard-line perspective on exploitative external influences on the running of football clubs and the treatment of supporters.
But here’s the thing: while my opinion on that hasn’t softened since the Crawley takeover or Messi’s move to Paris, I’ve learned a little bit about web3 in that time and explored beyond the headlines and straight-up scam artists. While I still don’t really know jack, I can imagine a world where the positive principles of web3 can be applied for the betterment of a club.
To lay my cards out on the table, I find web3 interesting sociologically rather than compelling in any specific way. I remain deeply sceptical of a lot of the people involved. I hold more than one NFT, bought or minted without exception for exploratory purposes. You could say I’m becoming web3-curious.
What shifted me from agin it to intrigued by it was a set of principles that make some sense, in the right hands, regardless of context. They come with negatives as well as positives and they aren’t a complete list of web3 priorities. For example, I have no inherent interest in cryptocurrency, which is at the heart of the principle of native payments.
But decentralisation (ownership of projects is distributed among users and not controlled by massive scumbag social media companies), trustlessness (web3 gubbins is all powered by incentives and economics, not by goodwill, assumption and faith) and community (you already know what community is) are values and methodologies I can understand. The entire blockchain thing is fascinating too but if I said I truly understood that I’d be a liar.
As I was driving home from work a few weeks ago with a lot of web3 information and theory bouncing around my brain, I stumbled upon an idea – I was off the clock so it was about football, because it always is. I’ll walk you through it.
There are web3 projects and organisations driven by tokens that are variously useful, positive and benevolent. Strip away the profiteering (and decentralisation enables that) and it’s possible to collaboratively build a project that brings people from all over the world together behind an ideal or a purpose.
What Crawley Town and indeed a recently announced Dorking Wanderers NFT-based digital membership scheme have in common with MyFootballClub and its ilk is some degree of actual or implied ownership in the football club. So let’s get rid of that avalanche of false promises and empty influence too, and assume it takes all the fake fans down the mountain with it.
What are we left with? A fun, noble, decentralised international community project built to back a club without the promise of having a say in the club itself. Or, to put it another way, a DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) Supporters Club. It’s community for the sake of community but I’m not completely certain it wouldn’t have some value.
It protects the football club from the membership but, if it were somehow to be a success, it could add a powerful new layer of support for, say, a non-league club like – picking one at random – Coventry Sphinx. It would require one hell of a utility offering for token holders in order to overcome the trustlessness aspect but it’s not like the web has never attached itself to a curio.
Then again, you can’t spawn fans without fans, so it’s a non-starter in non-league anyway. But I’ve developed a belief that somewhere away from the silly bollocks and parasites breeding where football meets web3 today (games excepted), there could be a project that does some genuine good tomorrow.
And, really, that’s the point. It’s not about traditional versus new or this model versus that. It’s not a matter of local ownership versus web3 or NFT money versus profits from a regional chain of car dealerships.
What matters is intent and ability. Organisations and projects that want to be involved in a football club to test or prove how clever they are are bad news. Unfit owners always have been. They’re using football for their own ends, not doing right by a club out of passion or love.
To my knowledge, there is no DAO or project being built authentically to do the opposite: to harness the potential of web3 to give to the game. But I’m less sure than ever that it’s a fantasy.
“Not for the first time this season a very small minority of those in the away section have acted in a shameful manner, this time making vile chants that no decent person would make and are in no way shared by Colchester United or the vast majority of Colchester United fans.”
Colchester United came away from their game at Leyton Orient with a very respectable draw – you can see the spectacular late equaliser below – but were forced to condemn and investigate chants from some of their travelling supporters about the late Justin Edinburgh. Edinburgh passed away suddenly in 2019 while he was the manager at Brisbane Road.
Salty beef extracts
Have I had a bad game? Or was I just made to feel that way? (Referee Tales)
Scandals, Strikes and the 2023 World Cup (Kult)
That’s entertainment (House of V)
Spurs’ latest collapse shows Conte has no answers to questions he doesn’t even care about (Football365)
Paul Pogba’s targeting by criminals is a human tragedy, he needs support (The Guardian)
Goal of the Week
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